Sermon Tone Analysis

Read for Scripture reading.

Prayer: pray through .

Turn to if you would.

Down payments on a home can feel like very small dents in a very large debt.

Like taking two steps up a Mount Everest whose summit seems impossibly far away.

But I received inheritance money once which helped me make a down payment, and let me tell you: the relatively small size of my down payment made me no less thankful for that inheritance money.

A small amount of help for a large debt still felt big to me in that moment.

The Bible calls the Holy Spirit the “guarantee” of our inheritance, the earnest money, the deposit, the down payment.

It is God’s general way during this difficult age, an age full of sin around us and in us, to give us this and other guarantees that full and final salvation is coming.

Every micro-salvation he gives us—freedom from lust even one time, rescue from fear, peace in distress, wholehearted forgiveness of someone else—is another deposit in our accounts giving us a foretaste of what it will be like to burn the mortgage note, to see a macro-salvation come to ourselves and God’s entire creation.

Last week we explored a prayer from an obscure woman in a polygamous marriage at the low point of Israel’s history, a woman whose prayer showed that she rejoiced in God’s micro-salvation for her in part because she saw in it the character of a God who would bring macro-salvation to the planet.

She knew her God to be the kind who delights in gracious role reversals: the poor sitting with princes, the bows of the mighty being broken while the feeble bind on strength.

This was Hannah, the mother of Samuel, the prophet who would one day anoint king David.

Hannah saw from her dark corner of the Bible story that light would one day come, that the Lord would shatter his enemies by giving strength to his king, by lifting up the horn of his anointed as he had lifted her up humble Hannah.

Look at .

Have you ever heard antiphonal singing?

It’s when one group of singers answers another group.

One group of kids sings, “Hallelu, hallelu, hallelu, hallelujah” and the next replies antiphonally, “Praise ye the Lord!”

This is a technique some of the greatest choral composers of Western and church history have used.

And it’s in the book of Samuel.

There is an antiphonal response to Hannah’s prayer at the end of Samuel.

It is David’s

Have you ever heard antiphonal singing?

It’s when one group of singers answers another group.

One group of kids sings, “Hallelu, hallelu, hallelu, hallelujah” and the next replies antiphonally, “Praise ye the Lord!”

This is a technique some of the greatest choral composers of Western and church history have used.

One of my favorite pieces ever calls for two separate choirs to stand at opposite ends of a cathedral and sing antiphonally to one another.

And this choral technique is present in the book of Samuel.

The brilliant writer who wrote the book has placed an antiphonal response to Hannah’s prayer at the opposite end of the book of Samuel.

It is David’s prayer in .

Let’s turn to there, to 2 Samuel 22:51.

David prays with some of the same words Hannah used.

But he adds two additional details.

He identifies who the anointed king is, and he identifies the time horizon of God’s promise to that king: it’s “forever.”

David represents the partial fulfilment of Hannah’s prediction of an anointed leader destined to introduce a new world order

1 Sam 22:51

But only a partial fulfillment.

The whole world didn’t get judged under David.

Some adversaries of the Lord have been broken in pieces, but there are plenty of them still strutting around.

The king Hannah prayed for—the one who would judge the ends of the earth and shatter his enemies—was David’s offspring, the anointed one, the Messiah, the Christ, Jesus.

1 Sam 22:50

David represents the partial fulfilment of Hannah’s prediction of an anointed leader destined to introduce a new world order

The reversal of the personal misery of this barren woman is found in the birth of a child, and in this stunning reversal lies the key to the reversal of Israel’s present situation—not only Israel’s, but the world’s.

The poem begins with a renewed Hannah, but by its end there is a vision of a renewed cosmos.

This is to be celebrated with delirious joy that results from the birth of a child and it is the birth of children, leading up to a particular person—a king, no less—that will help Israel and the world to reach their destiny.

The king Hannah prayed for—the one who would judge the ends of the earth and shatter his enemies—was David’s offspring, the anointed one, the Messiah, the Christ, Jesus.

Stephen G. Dempster, Dominion and Dynasty: A Biblical Theology of the Hebrew Bible, ed.

D. A. Carson, vol.

15, New Studies in Biblical Theology (England; Downers Grove, IL: Apollos; Inter Varsity Press, 2003), 144.The king Hannah prayed for—the one who would judge the ends of the earth and shatter his enemies—was David’s offspring, the anointed one, the Messiah, the Christ, Jesus.

So let us turn to the book of the origins of this Jesus.

Let us turn to the Gospels, particularly the Gospel of Luke.

1. YAHWEH’S MICRO-SALVATION FOR MARY

Luke 1:46

asdf

Luke 1:

In Hannah’s day, salvation came to Israel through a great role reversal: the barren woman had a miracle child.

Now salvation has come to the world through something even more miraculous: a virgin conception.

But Mary first experiences this as any woman in this room would: as a very personal miracle.

She knows she is very much in a humble estate.

Most probably she was a teenager, perhaps 14, if only because as best we know, rural Jewish women of her day were married young.

The reversal of the personal misery of this barren woman is found in the birth of a child, and in this stunning reversal lies the key to the reversal of Israel’s present situation—not only Israel’s, but the world’s.

The poem begins with a renewed Hannah, but by its end there is a vision of a renewed cosmos.

This is to be celebrated with delirious joy that results from the birth of a child and it is the birth of children, leading up to a particular person—a king, no less—that will help Israel and the world to reach their destiny.

But she’s an awfully theologically perceptive ancient rural Jewish teenager girl, and she sounds like someone who’s known Hannah’s prayer her entire life.

If so she internalized one of the big points of that prayer: the Lord looks to the humble and lifts them up.

She sees this happening to herself, and she exults, she rejoices, her soul magnifies the Lord.

Not like a microscope, making something tiny look big.

But like a telescope, making something massive and yet seemingly distant come right up to the reader to fill our whole sight.

Incidentally, the song is called the Magnificat because in Latin, “My soul magnifies the Lord” is “Magnificat anima mea Dominum.”

Speaking of choral composers, countless of them have found deep inspiration in this beautiful Magnificat and have set it to music, generally in Latin.

One great way to worship the Lord today would be to pull up a performance of Bach’s Magnificat on YouTube (youtube.com/watch?v=_-mwFNVusSU) and try to follow along in Latin, which is all straight from Scripture (traditioninaction.org/religious/b017rpMagnificat.htm).

The opening, in which the orchestra and choir burst out with a joyful “Magnificat, magnificat” is so powerful, and in the video of the German choir I watched last night—probably full of unbelievers—there was a soprano right in the middle who burst out in a big smile.

Bach got it.

He put Mary’s joy into music.

Mary rejoices in the God who is her “savior,” which is interesting, considering that Roman Catholic tradition, at least since 1854, has taught that she had no sin and therefore needed no savior.

It is possible that she is mainly talking about the salvation of God for the nation—Israel is indeed the major focus of Mary’s prayer.

Another part of this chapter speaks of both individual and national salvation together.

Look down at verse 69.

This is part of Zechariah’s prophecy after his son John the Baptist is born:

And look in that same prophecy at verse 77:

But this first section of the prayer seems focused on Mary herself.

I don’t think we need to choose whether Mary was thankful for salvation from her sins or salvation from her nation’s enemies.

It’s both.

Just like it is for us.

We need salvation from internal and external enemies, from the flesh and from the world and the devil.

And when we need those micro-salvations, we could do little better than to look to Mary’s next insight.

She knows as Hannah did that she could not lift her own horn.

She couldn’t exalt herself.

The Lord had to look, as verse 48 says, to her in her humility.

This first section of the prayer seems focused on Mary herself.

I don’t think we need to choose whether or not Mary was thankful for salvation from her sins.

And isn’t it always this way?

There is something profoundly anti-God in pride.

And there’s actually something paradoxically anti-self in it, too.

Here’s what I mean: one of the best ways to get knocked down is to puff yourself up.

Proud people typically fall.

The bigger the puffing the greater the collapse.

Over and over throughout the Bible God looks to the men and women of low estate.

He picks humble Hannah as the opening illustration in the story of David.

He just seems to delight in picking a prostitute, Rahab, as the one person out of all Jericho who survives a divine onslaught and gets to bring her family with her.